Snap decision can cause pain for life

It was 35 years ago, and I was temporarily pulling guard duty at the main gate to an American Army base in Vietnam. That afternoon a young Vietnamese woman, who appeared to be a "lady of the evening" from the nearby Vietnamese village, walked up to the gate and wanted to go through. She was drunked up, or drugged up, or maybe mentally unbalanced - which may have explained why she thought she was going to just waltz onto an American Army base - and when I told her no way, she tried to walk past me.

Of course, I wasn't going to shoot her just for that. She was unarmed, and she probably only weighed about 90 pounds, tops. So I grabbed her by the arm, frog-walked her away from the gate and told her to get lost.

That should have been the end of it. But as I walked back to the guard shack, she picked up an empty long-neck beer bottle and smashed off the bottom of it and started coming toward me, screaming and cursing and swinging the jagged glass in wide, crazy arcs.

Well, a broken beer bottle can take half your face off. And anyone who thinks he can easily take a sharp slashing object away from somebody, even a 90-pound female half his size, without running a high risk of getting sliced up himself has probably seen too many movies.

So I drew my sidearm, a standard-issue .45-caliber pistol, and pointed it at her - and not at her slashing hand, either, but dead center-mass, just like they'd trained us. Again, anybody who thinks it's easy to shoot a weapon out of somebody's hand, or even to just wound them, with a pistol, in a tense moment, with your heart pumping and your adrenaline surging, has seen too many movies.

So I held the weapon on her and shouted at her in Vietnamese and pidgin English to stop - and I silently told myself that if she came within slashing range I would shoot her.

I didn't have anything against that poor woman; I'd never even seen her before. But I wasn't going to get my throat slashed or my face sliced up just because this total stranger was having a bad day.

Fortunately, at about five yards away she stopped and dropped the beer bottle and then ran away, screaming and crying. I let her go, relieved that I hadn't had to shoot her.

But Lord help me, I would have. Yes, I would have felt bad about it. The memory of it would probably have dogged me to this day. And nobody would have slapped me on the back and bought me a beer and called me a hero for shooting a pathetic and confused little woman.

But I would have done it if I'd had to. And I just thank God that I didn't have to.

Now, I don't know what relevance, if any, this story has to the officer-involved shooting of 18-year-old Ashley MacDonald while she was reportedly wielding a knife in a Huntington Beach park last month. I wasn't in the park, and the investigation isn't complete, so I don't know what happened - and neither do you.

But in the wake of that shooting I've heard a lot of people say or imply that it's easy to take a weapon away from a suspect, that cops are eager to shoot people, and that after a shooting cops happily go about their lives, undamaged and unaffected.

And the vast majority of the time, that's simply not true.

"Whenever there's a death it's a tragedy - for the family, for the community and for the officers," says Lt. Craig Junginger of the Huntington Beach Police Department. "We didn't get into this job to take lives. We got into this job to save lives. When you take a life, it affects you."

Lt. Junginger knows what he's talking about. Because years ago, as a young HBPD motorcycle cop, Junginger was responding to a bank-robbery call when the bank robber opened fire on him. They exchanged some 30 shots, and in the end the bank robber was dead.

It was a completely justifiable shooting. The dead man was a certified bad guy, and Junginger was acting in direct defense of his own life and the lives of innocent bystanders. But Junginger wasn't doing any sack dances over the corpse.

"I don't like to talk about it much," he told me the other day. "But it affected me, it affected my family. It's a terrible thing to have to do."

Of course, I know there's not going to be much sympathy out there for the cops involved in the MacDonald shooting. Most people won't care that even if the officers are officially cleared of wrongdoing, they still most likely will face years of civil litigation and community hostility - and, I suspect, a lifetime of questioning and self-doubt.

True, Ashley MacDonald is dead, and the officers are alive. But chances are that no one who was involved in those brief, violent moments in the park will walk away unwounded.

Contact the writer: Gordon Dillow has been a Register columnist for the past 10 years. He served as a U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam in 1971-72, and recently returned from his third trip to Iraq as an embedded reporter with the Marines. Contact him at 714-796-7953 or GLDillow@aol.com

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